Mysteries of Sex: Tracing Women & Men through American History (review)

When I started graduate school in the late 1970s, my single shelf of women’s history books included Mary P. Ryan’s Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present. (It now seems quaint that, on its back cover, Richard B. Morris warned “any male chauvinist [to] be wary about entering the lists with an adversary so well-armed.”) The book was a valuable attempt to “describe the making of the social and cultural category, womanhood, the artificial mold into which history has persistently shaped the female sex” (Womanhood, 3). “What is woman?” Ryan asked, which reminds us that while postmodernists may have appropriated the idea, the social construction of gender has always been central to feminist inquiry. In later books, Ryan explored more specialized aspects of the history of American women, but in Womanhood in America she offered a broad, if early, synthesis of the field and a view of what remained to be done.¹

If her “youthful audacity” (Mysteries, 5) led Ryan to hurtle across several hundred years of women’s history in 1975, how much more daring to “Trac[e] Women and Men through American History” now. Mysteries of Sex, while it reconsiders aspects of Womanhood in America, should not be mistaken for a revised edition of that work. Neither a textbook nor a narrow scholarly intervention, it wrestles with thirty years of scholarship in an attempt to answer a question that Ryan still finds compelling: “What has that complicated and ever-recurring process of dividing humanity according to sex done in the world and over time?” (12) Shaped by three closely related concerns—“gender asymmetry, the relations of the sexes, and gender hierarchy” (13)—Ryan’s book explores how particular historical moments illuminate the meanings and uses of gender. Part I, “Making Sex in America,” which sweeps across the years 1500 to 1900, describes cross-cultural encounters, ideologies of domesticity, and the intercon-nectedness of sexual and racial systems. Part II focuses on the so-called public realm, and asks “What is the Sex of Citizenship?” Part III, which explores topics in paid work, sexuality, and immigration, suggests how divisions of peoples, races, classes, and nationalities have remade boundaries between male and female up to our own time. By the year 2000, Ryan argues, “Each of the three dimensions of the modern constellation of gender had been seriously eroded …” (281) and she offers a wide array of stories to ground that argument.

As in any grand narrative, Mysteries of Sex offers both challenges of selection and problems of interpretion. Inevitably, readers will get cranky about what is not here—the untold stories, absent connections, and uncited books. But rather than quibble with Ryan’s choices, I hope readers will discuss what is here and will engage critically with how Ryan fleshes out her understanding of gender over time and place.

My own disagreements with Ryan reflect two concerns: first, there is some slippage from viewing gender as a locus of power and authority to seeing sexual difference as a reflection merely of prescription or “culture.” In Ryan’s analysis, “patriarchs” organized societies in which their own dominance as men was natural and just. But when formerly enslaved men, in Frances Harper’s phrase, “‘positively beat their wives,’” they have committed “missteps,” (129) and when union men resist federal control over their, and women’s, labor, they are simply trying to hold onto “manly self-reliance” (185). If gender helps to mark status and authority for elite men, it also does the work of distributing power within less privileged communities.

My second concern is perhaps more fundamental. Like many historians who were shaped by late twentieth-century feminism (and here I include myself), Ryan is finally unwilling to reconsider the usefulness of gender itself as a conceptual framework across time and place. When she argues that the “border between male and female” (291) has become complicated by greater gender equality in...